Quote:
Originally Posted by ben voyonsdonc
One last point: hockey needs to be less white. People want to see and cheer players who they can relate to. By being so homogenous, it feels a bit like a club.
Hockey has a ton of barriers to entry for kids and families which excludes a lot of people who might want to play and who could really grow the game beyond where it is.
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In 2011 (the year I could actually find ethnicity statistics for the NHL), the NHL was comprised of
93% of players who identified as white, with the remaining 7% identifying as varying ethnicities. The oldest player (Mark Recchi, 42) was born in 1968, with the youngest players (Jeff Skinner and Nino Niederreiter, both 18) being born in 1992. The average age in the league was 26.5 years, so a birth date falling somewhere between 1984-1985.
The
percentage of Canadians that did not identify as a visible minority in 1986 was
93.7%, and 1991 is
90.6% (closest available years with census data). I'm not even going to bother trying to find 1968 at the high-end, because it was 95.3% in 1981, so it doesn't take a big imagination to guess what direction the number is trending. Sweden and Finland don't keep official statistics on ethnicity, but everything I've found -- if you read between the lines -- is that it is still majority "European descent" and I don't imagine that was the opposite in the 80s. Russia, oy. The US stats on this are vast though a bit unwieldy, but between 1980 and 1990, the percentage of those identifying as 'white' went from 83% to 80.3%, however their geographic distribution also places them as most concentrated in the top third of the country (y'know, that part of the US that actually gets winter) so it wouldn't be surprising to see that number significantly higher in states closer to the border.
It's not really surprising that the demographics of the NHL are reflective of the demographics of the countries and regions from which all the players are coming, nor is it surprising where the US is concerned that most players come from the part of the country that gets real winters. The candidate pool of players good enough to compete now is simply reflective of the demographics of decades past.
This is not something the NHL
alone can change, nor is it something that can be solved without a decade or more of effort across plenty of different layers. The work on this would need to start now for it to bear fruit in... let's say 13-14 years. Enough time to get kids involved at a young age where they can develop into the caliber of player that makes it to the NHL... and it isn't like the other traditional hockey markets are going to take their foot off the gas either.
The NHL -- to their credit -- has tried to promote and expand the game in non-traditional markets where success would hopefully inspire more visible minorities to get into the game. They need to do more in terms of marketing, outreach to partner with local communities to build rinks and get untapped areas of the country involved. The problem is it's also a winter sport and half the country receives barely anything resembling a winter at all, plus you're now competing with summer sports that can run year-round. Hockey equipment is expensive, takes a lot of time commitment from both the player and their parents, and requires nearby infrastructure in the form of rinks and community support in the form of local leagues and teams, and those rinks need to be indoors and with that is a much higher cost to run and maintain from cities that are already looking to cut expenditures.